Texting in cinema sparks deadly shooting by retired police officer

Michael Muskal

It was supposed to be a rare afternoon off for a Florida couple who put their young daughter in day care and went to see the matinee of the recently released military flick, Lone Survivor.

Instead of violence staying safely on the movie screen, Chad Oulson, 43, and his wife, Nicole, 33, became trapped in their own horror in the audience that ended with the husband shot to death and a retired police captain facing murder charges, all from a dispute about texting, US authorities said.

Curtis Reeves, 71 and a retired Tampa police captain, is facing a charge of second-degree murder, accused of shooting Oulson in a cinema in Wesley Chapel, Florida, about half an hour outside Tampa.

The cinema has a policy of not allowing weapons in the auditorium, Molly McFerran, a spokeswoman for the cinema told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. There are signs on the walls with drawings of guns and knives with a heavy red slash. There are no metal detectors or searches, she said.

The situation began on Monday afternoon as about 25 people were waiting for the 1.20pm start of the movie at the Grove 16 Theater. Oulson and his wife in one row and Reeves and his wife in the row behind.

Chad Oulson began noisily texting his daughter and Reeves asked him several times to stop, Charles Cummings, who was siting nearby, told reporters at a televised news conference on Monday. Voices began to rise in anger.

Advertisement

“Somebody throws popcorn. I'm not sure who threw the popcorn. And then bang, he was shot,” said Cummings, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, who wanted to see the movie as a birthday treat. His son, Alex, came along.

“He said, 'I can't believe I got shot,'" Alex Cummings, said of Chad Oulson. “There was a lot of confusion.”